Ted Cruz, Two; Marco Rubio, One—Scoring Their First Debate

The clash between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio—predicted for months, but never quite realized—finally arrived on Tuesday night during the Republican debate in Las Vegas. The two forty-four-year-old Cuban-American senators from large Sun Belt states had several sharp exchanges about immigration and national security—the two connected issues that have dominated the Republican primary since the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.

The policy distinctions between Rubio and Cruz are relatively substantive, and therefore the current debate represents a new phase in the campaign. Before the debate, which was hosted by CNN and Facebook, Donald Trump had driven most policy discussions since he entered the race, in June. For the most part, though not entirely, his policies have been cartoon versions of standard Republican orthodoxy. All Republicans support tougher border enforcement, which usually means things like adding federal agents, deploying surveillance drones, and using biometrics to track immigrants. Trump simply calls for building a wall. All Republicans support tax cuts. Trump calls for a $12 trillion tax cut, the largest of any of the candidates. All Republicans want to restrict immigration from Syria and Iraq. Trump wants to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. His Republican opponents can’t get to the right of Trump on any of these issues—and they can’t constructively debate him—because he has barely thought through the details. This drives other Republicans crazy, in the same way that Ronald Reagan’s seemingly fanciful call for a Strategic Defense Initiative—dubbed “Star Wars” in the press—drove his opponents crazy.

So the new Rubio-Cruz phase of the campaign is a welcome development. Compared to the conversations about Trump’s policies during the last few months, Rubio-Cruz is like Lincoln-Douglas.

I’ve argued previously that the two men are going after each other for two of their most substantial accomplishments. Rubio continues to attack Cruz for co-sponsoring and helping pass a reform of the N.S.A.’s telephone metadata program; Cruz continues to pillory Rubio for helping pass comprehensive immigration reform through the Senate in 2013.

Rubio and Cruz again argued over both bills on Tuesday night, but they also had a meaty discussion about foreign policy. Since arriving in the Senate, in 2011, Rubio has gradually become one of the most hawkish members of the Republican Party. His policies now align closely with the chamber’s leading Wilsonians, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who have long argued that the United States should spread democracy in the Middle East, sometimes at the barrel of a gun—a view that was widely discredited when George W. Bush left office, in 2009, and not just among Democrats.

While Rubio is an uber-hawk, Cruz is now his party’s leading skeptic of American interventions; he’s not as firm as Rand Paul, but he’s become much more prominent. On Tuesday, Cruz outlined in some detail his case against the interventionism of the Rubio-McCain-Graham wing, saying that Egypt and Libya were better off with the secular dictators that previously ruled those countries, and—more surprisingly—that Bashar al-Assad, who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, should remain in power. “If we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will worsen U.S. national security interests,” he said. “Instead of being a Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter, we ought to hunt down our enemies and kill ISIS rather than creating opportunities for ISIS to take control of new countries.”

So who has the upper hand in the Rubio-Cruz debate over these three issues: immigration, N.S.A. reform, and foreign interventions? The two candidates are wooing different segments of the Republican electorate. Cruz is attracting evangelicals and Republicans who identify as “very conservative,” while Rubio does better with “somewhat conservatives” and even moderate Republicans (yes, they exist). But almost all Republicans, no matter how they describe themselves, have one thing in common: they detest Barack Obama. In a Republican Presidential primary, tying your opponent’s policies to Obama is the key to discrediting them. This is why, in the long run, Cruz has the advantage in his three policy fights with Rubio.

On immigration and interventionism in Libya, as a senator Rubio literally supported the Obama positions, and on Tuesday night, he sometimes had a tough time explaining why. Cruz repeatedly poked at this weak spot. “Let's go back to the beginning of the Obama Administration, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama led NATO in toppling the government in Libya,” he said. “They did it because they wanted to promote democracy. A number of Republicans supported them.”

Rubio is being smeared with the same attack that Obama used against Hillary Clinton, in 2008, when Obama criticized her for trusting the Bush Administration to execute the war in Iraq. The more Libya descends into a failed state in which ISIS thrives, the more this line of attack resonates with Republican voters.

The dynamic was similar on immigration. Rubio defended his 2013 flirtation with comprehensive reform as an educational experience. “Here's what we learned in 2013,” he said. “The American people don't trust the federal government to enforce our immigration laws, and we will not be able to do anything on immigration until we first prove to the American people that illegal immigration is under control.”

The obvious response from the right is: Why did it take Rubio so long to learn not to trust the federal government, especially the Obama Administration?

On the third issue that they’ve been debating, Rubio has the upper hand. Cruz backed the Obama position on N.S.A. reform—to keep phone records with the phone companies and to add a judicial review process when the N.S.A. wants to review them—while Rubio opposed it. But the N.S.A.’s program to search phone records was merely modified, not discontinued, and it’s not the issue driving this race.

It’s immigration and ISIS that are dominating the Republican primaries, and, on those issues, Cruz has the edge.

Ryan Lizza, an on-air contributor for CNN, was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent from 2007-2017.

Only Bush seemed prepared to stand in the path of the Trump tornado.

He succeeded in Iran. Can he break through in Syria?

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.